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Genetic differences that make some people susceptible to developing meningococcal meningitis and septicaemia, and others naturally immune, are revealed in a new study of over 6,000 people, published in Nature Genetics.

An international research team, led by Dr. Erwin Schurr and Dr. Thomas Hudson, Scientists at the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre, have identified a gene on human chromosome 6 that makes people vulnerable to leprosy.

However it's important to keep in mind the enormous volume of world class wipe-outs that occur in the field of genetics.

One sign of the genome’s limited use for medicine so far was a recent test of genetic predictions for heart disease. A medical team led by Nina P. Paynter of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston collected 101 genetic variants that had been statistically linked to heart disease in various genome-scanning studies. But the variants turned out to have no value in forecasting disease among 19,000 women who had been followed for 12 years.

The old-fashioned method of taking a family history was a better guide, Dr. Paynter reported this February in The Journal of the American Medical Association.

If Scoliscore ultimately fails it won't surprise too many people in the scientific community. It happens (usually quietly) all the time.

Dr. Sigurd H. Berven, an orthopedic surgeon at the University of California, San Francisco, said such screening was expensive, and he added: “There’s little evidence that it does much good to screen children in the seventh or eighth grade. It’s much more important to identify patients with early-onset scoliosis, children in elementary school or even before.”

Well, thank God my daughter wasn't served up on a platter to an orthopedic surgeon!

I thank you Joseph O'Brien and the NSF and any other persons involved, from the bottom of my heart, for your efforts at implementing school screening. I'm sure I speak on behalf of many, many parents.